Be aware that unless one is a full professor, rarely does anyone 'secure' an academic career. Whatever path you take, brace yourself for 10-20 years of career uncertainty, short term contracts, and having to continually adapt, in getting to the secure stage.

To put it another way: it is akin to thinking that if you spend long enough watching the racing, then eventually you can be Frankie Dettori.

As others have said, there's no secure or direct way into an academic career without the PhD. Many of those examples you cite? They not only had careers prior to academia, they belonged to a very different era of academia. What Academia was in the 70s is not what it is today, so you cannot even use them as 'guide posts' because the reality is, the world changes quite rapidly.

I'll put it this way, you'll be competing with PhDs who have massive grants and projects behind them, a list of publications, and teaching experience. One of my mentors,3 years out from her PhD, already had two ARC linkage grants behind her, each around the 250,000 mark of funding (which is a lot for my discipline). ARC grants are the holy grail of grants in Australia, where Linkage, Discovery and DECRA are what Academics here aspire to secure. Your research also needs to have impact, a list of publications is not enough, they need to be in quality journals and book presses.

Another thing to note is that the elusive tenure is no longer a holy grail in protecting you from instability. At the university I was working at, two staff members, who were tenured, were let go, because their research performance was not meeting the required metrics.Tenure did not protect them.

I don't see how an intelligent person can make this analogy. In gaining work experience, one is not only directly exposed to the phenomena one studies, but also, in my field, applies the same research techniques to it as would be used in academia. It's more like if one is a jockey, this can then qualify someone to provide analysis on racing.

To get an academic position in politics without a PhD: go and work in a government department for 20 years and produce a string of research output and pat yourself on the back as the professorships roll in.

Which does rather tell us everything we need to know about your prospects in academia.

No, all it does is tell us all we need to know about your prospects of becoming a decent and civilised human being.

I think you should grow up; on the assumption you *do* want to be taken seriously. Your current behaviour is rather bizarre.

Excuse me, but I have detailed and justified everything I've said, demonstrating through examples that it is feasible, and expected supplementary responses, which most have been willing to provide. You, however, have simply written obnoxious one or two sentence responses which appear to be designed to insult me rather than engage with my post. I know which form of behaviour most would consider to be 'grown up' here, and it's certainly not yours.

As I think several posters have suggested, getting work as a Research Assistant is feasible, this is one way that you can get your foot in the door in academia without having/doing a PhD. I know several who finished a Masters and then went straight into Research roles on funded projects lasting several years, both within the social and physical sciences. However, they have both gone on to do PhDs, one part-time alongside the project, another after the research project. Both did PhD's because having one is more beneficial than not going forward, and along the lines suggested by others here. I do think you can develop a career in academia without a PhD, although it depends what subject area you are in (the more applied the better, I have a feeling) and also what Universities you apply to. As a side issue, not having a PhD and working with staff who do may cause consternation for both. We had a young Lecturer who did not have a PhD (although she was doing one part time) and even that led to people sniping that they shouldn't be a Lecturer. The paths that you will navigate to get where you want to go in academia will be different because you don't have a PhD.

There have been some well-reasoned responses in this thread that have (from where I’m sitting) answered your question. If you are here to seek positive reinforcement for your perception that a PhD is no impediment for a future senior academic role, then you have come to the wrong forum.

If you are planning for a long term career - why don't you consider the option of a part-time phd? I have to admit that I am not well informed about phds in your area of interest (I am more in the biology corner of the world) but it sureley should be possible to do a phd without spending a huge amount of cash. Or consider to apply for research assistant positions and do your phd there in your "spare" time - works for me and mine is definetly more labbased than yours ever will ;).

With a strong supervisor it will get easier to get good papers published and good papers are one of the many factors of success for a later career.

On another note: I highly doubt that a position in academics is best suited for someone with kids (as you mentioned earlier). You will have to stay flexible when you get a job offering at the "other end of the world", meetings normally don't take place between 9 and 5 and when you have to attend conferences you will also be seperated from you family. I am a soon to be phD mum and it is a constant juggling of responsibilities towards my child, my husband and my carreer.

Btw, you may be a bit romantisizing (correct word? no idea - I am not a native speaker ;)) about teaching students. Are you aware that if you are lucky one out of ten is actually interested in the stuff you are teaching? A colleague of mine was very dissapointed when her bachelor students asked her if there a fixed questions for the exams that they can learn without much thinking. Same for master students btw!

I have to grade lab notes from lab courses and you get the same, stupid mistakes every year. Sometimes a student gets creative and you actually get the same protocol as last year. I love working i the lab and I love teaching students, but grading their work has not much to do with loving your topic and working on it.

I don't know if it is possible these days to have an academic career in your field without a PhD. I have a friend who was a Professor of economics at a Russel group university who was awarded his PhD two years ago, a year after he retired at the age of about 70 but I can't see how that has any bearing on someone trying to get into academia in the 21st century. I think advice to seek a research assistant role is sound because it gets you experience working in an academic department and you will be better placed to see if there are opportunities. Also, if you haven't, write up your MSc thesis as a paper and try to get it published - you may find publicising your work tedious but you will get nowhere in academia without embracing the need to do so.

I also suggest that you contact the Professors and other researchers you know of who don't have PhDs and ask them for advice, rather than asking people who have already decided that a PhD is vital.

The number of professors who don't have a PhD probably have been in academia for decades - as has been pointed out by other posters.

Yes, it's possible to get a research assistant position without a PhD - assuming you aren't competing with the large number of unemployed PhD graduates for the job. It will be very difficult to move up to the next level (postdoc or junior lecturer) without the qualification and without first author papers.

To add my haporthworth, as others have stated the fact someone has managed to get a professorial position recently without a PhD certainly doesn't mean that you can plan a career in academia on that basis.